Tom Lazar wrote:
I work with it all the time and never experienced any problems. except for right now, when i did a search and replace with regular expressions, just simply remoing all line-breaks, ie. replacing '\n' with nothing.
Confirmed (on a circa 1500 line xml file: spinning ball for about 30 seconds for a regex replace of "\n" with ''). Seems to be somehow tied in with the fact that we're searching for "\n", as any other search, even with regex turned on, seems to be at least an order of magnitude quicker. For instance, I searched for "a" and replaced it with "<??>" (ie something unlikely to occur in the file) with regex turned on, and the query has four times as many matches and returns in a couple of seconds.
can anybody shed any light on this or give some advice, what other product to use for the 'heavy lifting stuff'?
Would you believe "TextMate"?
Text => Filter through command... => (Input: Document, Output: Replace Selection)
perl -pe 's/\n//g'
Pretty much instant. Undo is also virtually instant, should you not like what it's done to your document! While the "g" isn't strictly necessary in this instance it is in general if you're wanting to replace all occurrences.
For more generic regex substitutions just throw your "Find" and "Replace" regexes between the leaning matchsticks. For case insensitive matching you can use
perl -pe 's/\n//gi'
instead. Not ideal, but infinitely faster than the builtin (for now).
Cheers, Paul